The Angel of Highgate

15 DOCTOR GARRETTE’S CHILDREN

He was ambushed from behind as his key turned in the lock of his office door.

“Ah, Doctor Garrette, you are returned.”

Garrette stiffened. He had the door half open and now he pulled it shut and turned to face his ambusher. By the wheedling voice and asthmatic breathing, he could guess who it was. “Mrs. Parker… I believe I paid this month’s rent already.”

Rose Parker was his landlady, a jovial widow of extra-generous proportions who took a great interest in all her tenants — too much interest for Silas Garrette’s tastes. “On time as always,” Mrs. Parker said, and chuckled, setting her multiple chins into oceanic motion. “I don’t know how you manage it, I never see any patients come to your office.”

As soon as his key scratched in the lock, the children must have heard, for they began calling to him from the other side of the door: Father, father! Garrette blanched inwardly. Surely she must hear them, too.

“As I have already explained, Mrs. Parker, I make a great many house calls.”

“You must be exhausted then, tramping all over the city.”

“Yes. I am very tired.”

Father… Father are you there? the thin, reedy voices called as one.

“I would love to see how you have fixed up the premises—”

He was frantic to get away, before his prying landlady could ask about the childish voices emanating from inside the office. “Some other time, Mrs. Parker. As I just said, I am extremely tired.” And with that he slid in through the door and snatched it shut behind him before she had a chance to detain him any longer.

Dr. Garrette’s hands shook as he locked the door from the inside.

Father… welcome home, Father. The children waited behind another locked door, yet Silas Garrette could hear them plainly. He strode across the office to a second door, produced a heavy iron key and unlocked it. The door opened on a dark, windowless room, little more than a deep, narrow closet.

Papa, we have missed you, the children droned as one.

As he swung wide the door, the astringent smell of ethyl alcohol, chloroform, and other noxious chemicals bowled over him in an invisible cloud. He paused for a moment, allowing fresh air to swoosh in and intermingle before he stepped into the closed space.

Papa… Papa… the voices called from the darkness.

“Patience, my lovely children,” Dr. Garrette muttered. His hand groped across a work bench until his fingers closed upon a box of matches. He struck one and lit the gas mantle. The flame blossomed, illuminating the darkness.

The room was long and narrow with the work bench on one side. Atop the bench sat a gleaming row of glass vessels. Inside each one, a fetus floated in a clear preserving liquid.

His children.

They were all freaks; examples of gross deformities that nature would not allow to reach full-term: conjoined twins, fetuses with heads like baby pigs, one with four arms next to a worm with no arms or legs, a Cyclops… Each one a mother’s nightmare. A father’s despair.

“My beautiful children,” he breathed, stroking each jar in turn. He reached the final jar and lifted it to the light, gazing at the fetus floating within: his favorite, called Janus, a conjoined twin with two faces on one head. He did not consider them freaks, but believed them to be nature’s attempt at the next leap in human evolution. The god-like spawn of a future race.

Garrette held the jar close to his ear, listening. “What is that you said, Janus? Ah, yes, when will your new sibling be joining our little family? Soon, Janus, very soon.”

He kissed the fetus’ jar, which was covered with a sticky residue that left a bitter chemical taste in his mouth. The preserving liquid was his own experimental formulation — mostly ethyl alcohol mixed with chloroform and several other compounds. It worked reasonably well, although now, after many years, the liquid was becoming cloudy and increasingly turbid as the specimens within slowly decayed and disintegrated. He set the jar down carefully and stepped to the back of the room.

A mirror hung on the far wall and Silas Garrette studied a reflection split in two by a fine crack running diagonally across its wavy surface. He removed the rose-colored pince-nez spectacles and tucked them into a breast pocket. Then he doffed the white top hat. Two white phrenology busts sat on a table beneath the mirror. Dr. Garrette set the white top hat atop one. Next, he drew off the brown wig and draped it over the other bust. Following a long-established ritual, he peeled off false eyebrows, moustaches and then the elaborate side-whiskers which had been glued on with spirit gum. When he had finished, the visage that looked back from the mirror was unrecognizable. The head was completely bald and hairless — down to the lack of eyelashes. A tracery of fine red scars veined the skin of his scalp and crept down one side of his face: a souvenir from the Crimean War of an incendiary shell that had exploded over the hospital tent he had been working in. The tent had burned to the ground killing all inside, both wounded and medical staff. By a twisted miracle, he had survived. They found him a mile away, catatonic, staring into a dark wood, clothes smoldering, hair singed off.

Garrette moved closer to his crazed reflection, palpating the puckered skin of his scalp with his long, spatulate fingers, staring at a face that eerily mocked the unformed faces of his children, buoyant in their glassy wombs.

He reached down a bottle of chloroform from its shelf, then drew a clean linen handkerchief from his waistcoat pocket and flicked it open. Then he uncorked the bottle with his teeth and dribbled chloroform onto the handkerchief. That done, he carefully recorked the bottle and dropped into a battered leather armchair pushed into a corner. He draped the handkerchief loosely over his nose and mouth, the material sucking in and out as he began a series of slow, deep breaths. The gaslight flared in the fume-laden air of the room, making the shadows squirm, the light refracting weirdly through the glass jars in which his children hung suspended. In a matter of moments, the doctor’s breathing deepened and became sonorant; his eyelids began to droop as with every breath his body relaxed more and more, until by the tenth inhalation, his eyes flickered shut as an echoing mine shaft of sound opened up beneath him and he and the armchair submerged through the floorboards, gliding down into a soft-edged darkness.